Letters/sounds

For those of you who are still at the very beggining, I want to tell you about the letters/sounds we have in Romanian but which are not to be found in English, for example. You'll bump into this letters/sounds really frequently and maybe you want to know how to pronounce them

ă-- this sound is pronounced as "e" in mother, father. It's also known as the sound one makes when he/she doesn't know the answer to a question

î/â- these two letters are the representation of the same sound. î is found (in writing) only as the very first or the very last letter in a word. If it is in the middle of the word, it's written â Quite difficult to explain its pronounciation: imagine you have to pronounce uh in english as if you see something you don't like. Now cut the "h" sound out of that and you'll remain with something close to the actual pronounciation of the word in Romanian.

ș--- these is pronounced like the group of letters sh in mushroom.

ț-- this sound does not exist in English. For those of you familiar with Greek language, it is to be read as tz. For those who are not familiar with Greek: try to proonounce T+Z very quickly as to make it one sound. You'll get pretty close of the actual pronounciation.

Now that you know the rules, listen to some Romanian songs and try to ideantify these sounds as they are pronounced by the singers.

One negative aspect is that many times you'll find texts written without the diacritics so you'll find a, i, s, t instead of ă, î, ș ,ț . But in time, once you get used to the language, you'll be able to tell which is which even if they are written the same.